Pacifist
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: [Next] There were people weaker and less fortunate than him,, but that didn't change the fact that he was weak.
1. Part 1

**A/N:** Challenges:

Diversity Writing Challenge, h4 – write a twoshot  
The Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, A Surprise and a Fight with BlackTyrananmon (event) – two or threeshot where a character is confronted about their character  
Haloween Trick or Treat Bag (2015), day 12: witches – write about a desperate decision having unexpected consequences

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 **Pacifist**  
 _Part 1_

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It was good he didn't have any siblings – or maybe a kindness for all of them. He was trouble enough for his parents: always sick, always needing to be watched a little extra closely… It was why his mother had to leave her job, so she could be home full time and could watch him. She'd plan to go back, originally. She'd spent five years at university becoming a pharmacist and threw it all away because of him.

Of course, all parents had to think about the situation of their lives when they decided to have a child. But it was a little different with ones that didn't come out normal. He actually wasn't too bad, compared to some other kids. He met a lot of unfortunate souls in the children's hospital, because the small problems most kids had never got that far. Kids who were hacking up their lungs most hours of the day, whose nails squashed their nail beds, who had to be admitted for infections other kids could cough and sweat out in a matter of days. Kids with little balloons called aneurysms in their brain that could blow at any moment and kill them. Kids with cancers that could be cured but after lots of pain, and kids with cancers that couldn't be cured at all. Kids whose entire bodies, inside and out, were deformed – and there he was lucky, because it was only his heart that suffered.

But the heart and the brain were two vital parts of human life. One could only live for three minutes without them.

And, for him, his heart had a hole. An odd hole, that they couldn't fix immediately like most holes and they'd had to put a band aid on it instead. The term was actually called "banding", but he'd misheard it when he was younger and it had stuck in his head. And it was an appropriate analogy, in any case. The banding was a temporary operation that simply held the two sides of the hole together until he was old and fit enough for a proper surgery. And, in the interim, he had to take care not to overload his heart, and his parents had to make sure the hole didn't start to leak, or blood didn't start to go the other way through the heart (he'd seen a girl who'd had that problem. She'd been completely blue), or he doesn't get an infection that'll cause the muscle more stress.

So his mother never went back to work after her maternity leave. She had her hands busy with him. The pharmacy got a new pharmacist. His father continued to work as a police officer, and they started putting as much money as they could spare (and perhaps a little more; he still wasn't sure) away, so they could pay for his operation.

They had enough, now. In between regular trips to the paediatric cardiologist and the children's hospital, and their regular day to day expenses.

He knew he was fortunate. He knew his parents had sacrificed a life of comfort and possible future siblings, and her mother her job, for him and his health. He didn't have the right to fear the thing that would set them free from all of that – but he did. He was afraid. Afraid and weak.

Courage and strength, for him at least, went hand in hand.

It didn't have to, of course. It simply did. All the heroes in fairy tales were strong, after all, and he liked fairy tales because he knew better than most children how the real world looked. How every child didn't have rosy cheeks. How some of them had sunken so deep, one had to wonder where the muscles that caused the mouth to open and close and chew could go. And yet they did breathe, and talk, and chew. Just how he walked around with what was, functionally, a hole in his heart. People even called it that, though it wasn't a physical hole. Just the two ends of a rounded shape not quite joining. It was actually called a septal defect, and the types depended on what two chambers were linked by the malunion. So the one he had was a ventricular septal defect, even if it didn't look like the textbook example of one. A textbook example would have been fixed years ago. And maybe he wouldn't have had the time to reject the idea of a permanent fix.

It wasn't that he couldn't imagine not running without being short of breath, or doing the other things normal kids his age do. It was everything else: the chance that it would go wrong, the chance that things would change drastically with the family, at home…and the chance that he'd fallen too far behind to ever be normal, even when there was nothing physically holding him back anymore.

It was easier to stay sick, that way. More cowardly to, but a quiet life was at least a peaceful one. But, of course, his parents couldn't accept that. His suffering brought them pain. He drained their resources, their time… It would all be finished with that operation and how could he tell his parents he didn't want to have it?

He couldn't, regardless of whether they'd be able to convince him otherwise or not. He couldn't because he owed them for all the extra things he'd taken away, all the extra things they'd sacrificed for him.

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The digital world had, at first, just been another quiet activity for him. Something he could do without having to get out of a chair and move too much, which meant it was something he could take the time to enjoy before his own apparent lack of breath choked him. He knew he wasn't actually lacking breath, not like those poor kids who were coughing up yellow or green phlegm every day. But it felt like that, when the blood ran in circles back through the functional hole.

Through the Battle Terminal, it was his avatar that ran around with Gaomon, and not his body. It was a place he could have adventures without really having them. Where he could play with friends the way he'd always dreamed of playing, except without his body being the chain to tie him down. Outside the terminal, he sometimes thought of how he'd be able to do all those things once he had his operation as well – but the real world was different to the digital one. His friends had known him for years. And classmates and even people he barely knew in return. They'd always think him fragile. They'll always remember all the opportunities he'd missed. He'll always be the useless, weak little boy and the operation wouldn't change that.

But he was a different Inui Yu in the digital world. The him there never had the inability to run and play, or even fight as they sometimes did with other digimon. Those were sparring matches, of course. It was against the rules to go for a kill and that was good, because it was the sort of game that encouraged friendship and bonds and blood would just sully all of that.

Or that's how it all was, until he vanished into the Battle Terminal and entered the digital world for real.

At first, he was so frightened he couldn't move. He could easily die all alone. No-one to calm him down if he ran a little bit too much. No-one to help him with the medications whose names he couldn't all pronounce, let alone remember. If they stayed the same over the years, he might have managed it better, but they didn't. When new and better drugs came out, he was switched out. If he got bad side-effects, he switched out. When he was sick, he got extras added on to the normal regimen. And he had none of those with him at the moment. None of them in the digital world.

Normally, a person's first concern in such a situation would be water, then food. Medicines took first place for him – the medicines he'd pretty much lived off, and was so attached to. He felt even more vulnerable without them, and he was already vulnerable in a strange place on his own.

But he wasn't entirely on his own, and Gaomon seemed to know all the right things to say.

After a rampaging Tyrannamon had chased them a good distance first.

It was funny, actually. The Tyrannamon had roared so loudly they'd both shot off, and he only realised later he was panting but not dizzy and his chest didn't feel like it was going to burst. _This is what it's supposed to feel like,_ he thought. It was much easier to breathe too, when he calmed down. This was how he'd feel after his operation…perhaps. He couldn't guarantee it, after all. And it would be far more terrifying than being chased by a Tyrannamon and he'd be all alone as well.

'I'm here,' said Gaomon.

Yes… Gaomon was there.

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Even with Gaomon, he was scared of the new world. He wished he had more friends: to be with him, to protect him, to comfort him. And then he ran into Tsurugi and Agumon. And more enemies – but he was starting to work out the enemy thing. They didn't differ too much from when he and Gaomon were on opposite sides of the Battle Terminal. The enemies were ones he'd seen before, and they had their weak points. He only had to point them out and they could attack.

And with GeoGreymon on their side, it became far easier.

Maybe he grew complacent. He missed his parents, yes, but the digital world had a freedom he hadn't realised before. The surgery would still be waiting for him when he got home. That weak heart of his would be waiting as well – or would catch up with him, and that would be even worse because how long before he could breathe normally again? How long before his chest stopped hurting? How long before the room stopped spinning? How long before he could get out of a bed again?

If he could be free of all that in this world, and have friends like Gaomon and Tsurugi…why did he need to go back and face what waited?

He could be a different Inui Yu in this world. A stronger one. The human who fought alongside his digimon, even if he was always giving the orders from a safe distance and watching the results. He couldn't even watch calmly because the distance wasn't as safe as he would like, but he had to be able to see the battlefield as well. And Tsurugi had no qualms about standing close. Neither had Ami, actually. And her Pichimon was still at the baby stage. If she got into trouble, they wouldn't be able to fight back and yet she stood almost neck to neck with Tsurugi, instead of a few paces behind like Yu.

Ami sort of sat between Tsurugi and Yu. She wasn't as reckless, nor as cautious. The one thing she didn't sit between them on though was her opinion on fighting. 'I came because I could raise a digimon without having to fight,' she retorted, after a slightly insensitive comment from Tsurugi. Suffice to say, she wasn't too pleased to be in a world that necessitated fighting every other day.

And she seemed suspicious of Yu's ease in it, as well. He wasn't sure if it was about the fighting or the ease, but they were both truths in a sense. He could fight because it was Gaomon who did the actual fighting – him and GeoGreymon and, rarely, he felt he wasn't strong enough to help out because he was helping, by pointing out the weak points, and by coming up with strategies. As for the ease… It was his dream world, without the enemies to fight – or maybe his dream world did include those enemies, because he'd always felt he was falling short of the hero mark, hadn't he?

And he was more of the side-kick than the hero in this tale, because he gave the commands almost from behind the scenes and let Tsurugi and GeoGreymon do the main fighting. They were the ones who'd get blasted first if things went wrong, or if Yu was too slow, or if they themselves were too slow when Yu could, in his own mind at least, blame them for being a little too slow to execute his plan in the opposite circumstance. Tsurugi was the defender and the convenient scapegoat and he knew it was a cruel way of thinking but, deep down, it was the truth. Of course, Tsurugi was a friend as well: the friend he always wanted, that forgot he even had a heart condition until Ami reminded him, but even she relaxed when he said the digital world came with the perk of rewriting that and mothered him in a far tamer way than his own mother. But she was still wary – the sort of wariness he expected his parents would always have with him, the sort the kinder friends would always have with him…because the crueller ones would just look with scorn at a weakness that would soon be only subjective.

And it was much easier when it was physically there…or not there at all.

If he could make her forget, he would. But he couldn't and she didn't mention it again so he supposed that was the best he would get. The digimon didn't understand. Tsurugi forgot and remembered and forgot again. And they didn't need to sacrifice anything to be with him. Ami didn't fight anyway. Tsurugi rushed to the front lines anyway. If anything, him being the strategist in the shadows was a help to both of them, and he loved that. Sure, the constant attacks frightened him still because what if Tsurugi and GeoGreymon did at some point lose? Gaogamon would only be able to do so much on his own, being in the support position for so long. Maybe he should try and break that mould – but why? They didn't have to get into a situation like that. They didn't have to lose.

He couldn't help the way he was born, with that functional hole in his heart, but this world took away those boundaries and he could do all the things he wanted to do but couldn't in a place like this. It didn't have to change. He didn't have to get greedy and do something that'll shake the balance. Things were fine the way they were. He might not seek out battles actively, but he could fight like this, in a way he couldn't in the real world. He could be strong. And he could be normal without needing that operation in their real human world.


	2. Part 2

**Pacifist**  
 _Part 2_

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In retrospect, he shouldn't have allowed things to change. He hadn't realised though, that collecting friends and allies would only hurt them in the end.

No, that wasn't quite right, was it? It helped them in the grand scheme of things, but that was a somewhat further point down the road. Before that, it hurt. Before that, he was blind to what destruction he was going to cause.

It was all a result of his selfishness, in the end. If he'd been searching for the way out or how to defeat the bad guys instead of aimlessly wandering about. If he'd even paid more attention to Gaomon because that might have stopped him from making too many friends, like Trailmon, and then crying when they died. Because they weren't meant to die. The digital world wasn't supposed to be soiled by things like that except this wasn't the digital world behind the Battle Terminal but the real thing and here, digimon did die. They'd killed their fair share too but he hadn't noticed, hadn't thought anything of it at all. Ami and Pichimon began to make more sense but it was far too late to do anything with that understanding.

He'd made friends with Trailmon and made Gaomon jealous. And Trailmon had died. And he only had himself to blame with how much it hurt his heart.

It hurt like it hurt when he'd run a little, or when he was anxious, or scared. It hurt like his heart couldn't pump blood fast enough, like he was starving for air when air wasn't the problem at all but the blood going in circles around his heart instead of around his entire body. It hurt like he was going to burst, or faint, or lose this brief paradise that had suddenly grown so warped –

And he had to fix it somehow. Band-aids. Pulmonary artery banding. _Something._ Revenge.

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Revenge was the coward's path, not the heroes. He knew that because the stories never showed the hero taking revenge but often it was the motive of the villain, if it wasn't greed or love. Or they tried to take revenge against the hero at some point in the tale. He wasn't sure when his own thoughts had twisted so badly that, in the aftermath of Trailmon's death, he'd burned with that. With revenge and hatred. Both of them villainous emotions. Both inappropriate for the hero he'd been acting as.

And, in the digital world, negative emotions turned into a powerful destructive force. They changed Gaomon. Turned him bigger, like Gaogamon, but black. Turned him angry and powerful for a moment before the black suffocated them both. He didn't know whether Tsurugi and GeoGreymon had to hold them back or not, or who caught him when he fell and left BlackGaogamon to his fate.

Because he fell without BlackGaogamon. Left the digimon he'd been neglecting caught up in a storm of emotions he couldn't handle, because they weren't Gaomon's – or just Gaomon's. They were Yu's. And maybe Gaomon to some level despised those emotions too, because he'd been watching them, hadn't he? Yu and other digimon. Yu and Trailmon. It wasn't Gaomon he was crying over, raging over. Gaomon had absolutely nothing to do with it except this bond they shared that meant all of Yu's uncontrollable emotions went over to him.

Afterwards, he just lay and stared at the ceiling and thought about it all. Thought about all the hints he'd missed, and all the ones he'd ignored. Thought about how selfish he'd been.

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He didn't learn. Andromon wormed his way into his weak heart. But that one was a little unavoidable. Andromon was the doctor, who took care of him after he collapsed, and who took care of Wanyamon. So of course they had to talk. Especially when Tsurugi and Ami were busy defending them against the Commandments – with only half their fighting force.

And Andromon didn't really make him feel any better. He explained how digimon started off weak as well, just like humans. And how they had to work hard to overcome their limitations and become stronger. How the bond between human and digimon opened up even more doors – but also more limitations. Like that emotional link they shared, that had let Yu's emotions flow in and corrupt Gaomon's evolutionary programme.

In other words, he explained all the things Yu had let himself grow blind to because he didn't want to see them.

And now Gaomon was back to square zero because of that. And he might have lost his second chance, as well.

Of course, humans didn't really get second chances. Near death experiences didn't leave them as helpless newborns again. They either died or they didn't – or a coma was a third option, he supposed. Sleeping days or weeks or months or years away. Sometimes they lost their memories in traumatic events. Sometimes they locked them away. Maybe, in that sense, it was like being returned to the most basic, baby, form. Maybe digimon didn't really get second chances either. Maybe being degenerated didn't set their lifespans back to zero, but only everything they'd since gained.

He'd left Wanyamon that helpless.

He was helpless already.

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They broke into the medical facility. Andromon was dead. Tsurugi and Ami and their digimon were no-where to be seen. There were only the digimon in incubators – and Yu.

He couldn't even run away because this was like the Children's Hospital, filled with patients even worse off than him. Like that girl who'd come in blue because her blood had started flowing backwards. It had some funny name. Eye-sen something or other. He only had a little hole in his heart that wasn't even a real hole and that meant he couldn't run very fast or for very long and couldn't physically fight either, and wasn't that depressing because right now all those digimon in the incubators needed someone strong who could fight for them and save them when they couldn't save themselves, and Yu was all they had?

Even though in the digital world, his heart's weakness wasn't physically holding him back.

Was this how he was going to be for his whole life? Was the defect in his heart an excuse now, and no longer the cause? He had to do something. He was the only one that could. But for the life of him he couldn't think of _what_ except running away and he couldn't do that because it would mean leaving those poor digimon in the incubators all alone to die.

And he couldn't do that.

He began to cry. _Someone… Tsurugi, please help!_

But Tsurugi didn't come like the knight in shining armour, like the true hero.

The enemy came closer though, reaching for the first incubator. Wanyamon's.

He screamed. He threw himself forward like a shield even though he knew it was stupid. His body had simply moved before his brain. 'Wanyamon!'

Wanyamon's eyes snapped open. He glowed. The incubator suddenly burst and there was a new digimon standing between Yu and certain death because he wasn't strong enough to be the hero by himself.

'MachGaogamon,' the digimon corrected. Gaomon at the Perfect level. Three levels up from the baby Wanyamon.

Afterwards, he explained. 'Risking your life for me was enough.'

'Even if I wouldn't have accomplished anything?'

'You did.' And that was right, because this was the digital world where emotions were an unrivalled power.

Maybe it was like that in the real world too.

Hadn't he reasoned it out? With Gaomon returning to the baby Wanyamon stage? How it could be the same as a human who lost all memories and had to start from ground zero again? Even if there were differences, like how human bodies didn't go back to their infancy and only continued to age, how human evolution was far more subtle, how humans didn't have the special powers (or special weaknesses) that digimon did. They had different strengths, like the ability to feel emotions so fierce, it warped the world around them. Good emotions, like hope. Bad ones, like hate and anger and fear.

If the digital world was a dream to teach him only that, then it was worth it.

But it wasn't. It was a sort of reality too and he still had to fight. Fight past his own weaknesses. Fight past his doubts, his inabilities. Fight the enemies in front of him, and the enemies in front of his friends like Tsurugi had been doing for so long too. Because he could do more than he'd been doing. He could run in this world, and even in the human one where he couldn't, he could do more than stay in his room all day. If he'd gone out more, his parents wouldn't have needed to buy him things like the computer and the Battle Terminal. They could have saved the money for something special for themselves, or a little comfort, or added the money to the black hole his operation had long since become. And maybe, if he'd been more sociable, more open, more willing to step outside the safety of his house, his parents might not have been so worried all the time, either. His mother might even have been able to think of going back to work, if he'd shown he knew his own limitations and was responsible enough to not overwork himself, but also not bury himself in a comfortable darkness instead.

And now he had to ignore that comfortable darkness and take the pains of being in the sun instead. Unless he wanted those poor digimon in the incubators to be crushed, with Wanyamon as the first tribute of his cowardliness. Or something similar, because this wasn't the sort of dream that looped but life that kept on going forward with new scenes.

More opportunities to slip back into his old persona, or to find the inner strength he'd let waste away like he was cancer.

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It was ironic that the lesson he'd learnt soon needed to be passed on to somebody else. And yet, he didn't have the right or the opportunity to do it. He could keep the other digimon from interfering with a fight between friends, however.

It wasn't something he'd ever thought of doing before. Holding down the fort. Being the last line of defence. He was the strategist, after all. The kid always hiding behind the safety line as opposed to in front of it. It was a very different feeling, being the one to keep that safety line there while others stood behind it. Tsurugi and Ami on one side, and RizeGreymon. Kahara Sho and Crowmon on the other side.

He could hear snippets of their argument. Tsurugi had told him a bit as well, when he'd first realised the identity of the Black Knight. An old friend of theirs that had drifted away, after another friend disappeared. A boy who'd withdrawn from Tsurugi because he was so sunny, and the other so stuck in the shadows. And there was a big difference between Yu and that boy, because Yu had hid in the shadow behind the sun instead, hadn't he? And other differences too. Sho didn't have the excuse of a hole in his heart. Or…he did. A different sort of hole. Yu's wasn't a real hole either but it was a physical hole. Sho's was more psychological. Losing his best friend. Watching everyone else forget about her… Losing his digimon, even though he'd been resurrected again.

Yu could sympathise with that as well. Almost. He hadn't quite lost Gaomon after all, but he'd come close. In his case though, he had no-one to blame but himself. He'd been filled with rage. He'd corrupted the digi-soul. He'd forced Gaomon to fight for revenge and the result had left him a helpless baby who'd had to grow up quickly to protect him again. It was different with Sho, who'd lost his Peckmon through no fault of his own, unless it was a fault to attract bullies and maybe that was a fault. It tended to be weak people who attracted bullies, after all. Maybe it was. If Yu had approached the world in a different manner, instead of hiding in his bedroom from it, he might have managed to ward off the most biting remarks. At least, in his case, bullies were scared of getting physical. Hurting him a little might have put him in the hospital, and then they'd be in bigger trouble then they could get out of. He heard that, once, quite a few years ago, there'd been a deaf girl. Some bullies had punched her in the face and destroyed one of her hearing aids. The parents had lodged a complaint, and because hearing aids were expensive, the boy's parents had had to pay the cost for a replacement and they hadn't been pleased at all. The story tended to vary on what happened to the boy. Some say the parents chopped his body into bits and sold the pieces to pay the cost. Others said he was punished severely, never getting a cent of pocket money until the debt was paid. Others said he had to work around the neighbourhood and things. Others still said the police had him locked away in jail.

It was the sort of urban legend that got warped, and he was honestly surprised the only bit that varied between versions was the end. But it kept the bullies off his back and he'd never realised just how much until he heard about how those kids had shoved Sho to the ground and stomped on his digivice mini. He'd been lucky, he realised. He knew he'd been lucky already, from those kids in the hospital who practically lived their full time, but this was another way of showing him the same thing. Sho didn't have any health problems at all. For all the trouble it was, his heart condition had protected him from the worst of what children were capable of.

The digital world really was amazing, for giving him all of these realisations. Even though he'd wanted to run away and that was why he'd accepted the place with open arms to begin with.

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He still hadn't realised it. True strength. But now he understood. MachGaogamon needed more power. Tsurugi needed more help and the only way he could help was with his emotions: by being strong.

It wasn't anything tangible. He just clasped his hands and opened his eyes so wide they burned, even though he wanted to close them. He just kept them open and pleaded "you can do it" silently, over and over. He stayed like that as MachGaogamon fought, as he felt his energy leaving him… Was that the true power of emotion? A force so powerful it could give what meagre strength he had to his digimon as well? He wondered if it worked both ways. Would that dark energy have destroyed him, or warped him like it had Sho? Was that why Gaomon had regressed? To save him from that? Perhaps. He might never know. Andromon was the expert in those things and he wasn't there anymore. But he supposed he didn't need to know a thing like that either.

What he needed to know was strength. And as he felt his energy slip away, he understood. And he didn't stop. Because to be a hero meant to be willing to give everything, including your life, for the cause you fought for, and he fought for his friends and that was a good enough cause.

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He didn't die. Norun came and gave him a new digivice and power, and MachGaogamon grew even stronger. They fought the final enemy. They won. They, except for Norun who'd been a guest to begin with, returned to their own world, stronger. And changed.

'When is my operation date?' he asked his parents.

'Well…' His father was caught off guard. He stammered. 'We didn't make a booking, because you looked…' Like he didn't want it. So his parents had picked up on that after all.

He smiled. 'It's okay now,' he said. 'I was scared but I'm not now. Can you tell me when you do? I wanted to tell my friends.'

They were even more surprised, because he'd never been particularly keen about telling his friends about his condition, even though everyone already knew. But he'd learnt what weakness and strength really was, since then. And made friends that would last a lifetime in the process.

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 ** _The End_**

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 **Post A/N:** Explaining some of the medical stuff in case I lost a few readers along the way. :D

Coughing up yellow/green sputum regularly – cystic fibrosis. There are a few other diseases that'll do that, like bronchiectasis, but this was a specifically paediatric setting so CF is the staple there.

Whole body deformities – lots of possibilities of this one. Marfan's syndrome which is a favourite amongst medical students, trisomies like Klienfelter's and Down's Syndrome, foetal alcohol syndrome etc.

Yu's heart condition – canon doesn't explain it, but the most common heart defects in kids/when born are septal defects. There are three main types of those depending on which chambers of the heart are involved (there are four chambers), and a few syndromes that include them with other things. Most of those are fixed in the first year of life if detected, and small septal defects can close spontaneously so don't need to be fixed at all. Since Japan has a good medical system, I'm assuming it's less that the hole was a problem but not detected (assuming it's not something he acquired recently but those are more common in teens/adults) and more one of the special cases that can't be fixed immediately. In those cases, they do something called a pulmonary artery banding which functions like a band aid on the hole, and then when the patient is older they'll do the proper operation.

Blood flow direction reversing – this is in the context of holes in the heart/septal defects. Blood is a fluid, so it goes from high pressure to low pressure. Usually, that means oxygen carrying blood to no oxygen blood and then goes back through the heart again. Sometimes, the blood flow can reverse because of pressure changes, and the blood goes through the hole from the non oxygen side to the oxygen side without having actually gotten oxygen from the lungs, so that blood going around the body has no oxygen in it and the person goes blue. That's a really bad sign because people don't last long when their blood's not dropping off oxygen around the body. Case in point is carbon monoxide poisoning. The syndrome is actually called Eisenmenger's syndrome, but that's something Yu's parents are more likely to remember than Yu himself. He is more scared of the operation than complications of leaving the septal defect at this point in time.


End file.
